Would God Still Be Good?

“Give thanks to Him; bless His name!
“For the Lord is good;
His steadfast love endures forever,” - Psalm 100:4-5

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On May 6, 2020, my daughter Sienna Ruth was born.

After hours of a labor that was going well by all accounts, an emergency call went out and within seconds the delivery was filled with hospital staff. As others set up at different stations and prepped for different procedures, one doctor approached me to explain that it had become imperative to get the baby out immediately and that we had our choice of either a C-section or a forceps delivery.

Given that the forceps delivery was faster, we went with it.

Sienna was out within another few seconds and was placed onto my wife’s chest, completely still and not breathing. During the labor, the umbilical cord had wrapped around her neck, cut off oxygen and apparently stopped her heart.

After the briefest moment getting to see her for the very first time, she was taken away to a small workstation a few feet away from the delivery bed. Five medical personnel went to work, rubbing her limbs to get blood flow started and intubating her to help her breathe. After what seemed like too long, I noticed that the posture and facial expressions of the people working with her lightened up considerably. Their bodies relaxed, they started smiling and eventually came over to tell us that she had managed to start breathing.

We were not completely in the clear, however, as Sienna’s next destination was the NICU for some monitoring and a few tests to make sure she hadn’t received any kind of brain damage from the oxygen loss. After more interminable waiting, another doctor came to inform us that there didn’t seem to be any signs of brain damage and that it looked like she was going to make a full recovery.

Due to COVID, however, only one of us at a time could go to visit her in the NICU. That night, I got to spend just 45 minutes with my intubated daughter as she voiced her displeasure at her first few hours outside of the womb with a voice that was raspy and exhausted from the tube that had been forced down her throat.

As hard as it was to process Sienna’s very near death experience in her first moments after birth, my heart was lifted when the NICU nurse on station that night asked me what had happened. I managed to get some semblance of the story out to her through emotions that threatened to collapse me into tears at any moment, and she expressed back to me that she never would have guessed that was what had happened based on what she had seen of Sienna’s recovery. Apparently the speediness and completeness of her comeback didn’t quite fit with the trauma of her birth.

Every child’s entry into this world is an act of God’s grace. Birth may be a natural, every day occurrence: its usualness in no way offsets its absolute awesomeness.

But my daughter’s first experience of the miraculous grace of God didn’t stop with her birth. The next handful of events in her life were completely saturated in it, too. She will never remember what happened, but her parents certainly will, and it is an amazing thing to think that perhaps even some of the medical staff who helped her enter into the world may have gotten a taste of the great grace of God, as well.

It’s hard to describe the exact feeling of those moments when Sienna was being resuscitated and my wife was being cared for after the birth. It was a strange combination of hyper-focus on what was happening, prayer to God that He be gracious and spare my daughter and the emotional fragility of teetering on the edge of what I knew could end up being the worst day of my life. My wife and I have had friends that have experienced the death of a child right around a due date. We are well-aware that it is not as rare or uncommon as one might hope.

But God was gracious to us that day. He was not obligated to spare Sienna. He did not (and does not) owe us her life or anything else. If He had seen fit to do so, He would have been justified in ending her life just as He is with every single other (Deuteronomy 32:39).

I have thought a lot about how I might have processed all of it had it gone that way. Would I still consider God to be good if He had taken my daughter? It is one thing to assent to the holy goodness and sovereignty of God in the abstract, away from where the rubber really meets the road. It’s a whole other thing to have to walk your talk when He has taken something you love without any discernible reason. I had a mentor in his seventies who said that, after having lost one of his sons to leukemia when the boy was nine-years-old, he still didn’t have the slightest idea why God had done it. After decades of prayer and reflection, he still didn't know what in the world God had in mind.

But he did not doubt God’s goodness. I’m sure he wrestled with it at times. He admitted that there was far more that he didn’t understand or could ever know than there was that he felt certain about.

Job lost his entire family and refused to curse God. He never doubted that God was completely in control of the situation or ultimately responsible. Still, he landed on, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21) But even he eventually wound up on the wrong side of the argument, needing to repent after some prodding from his friends and his own failure to maintain perspective.

Pain is the great perspective destroyer. It tends to come at us when we are least prepared for it. It doesn’t play fair and it laughs at our attempts to maintain control of our own lives. It convinces us to define love according to our own desires and then to judge God based on how much we perceive Him to be failing to live up to our personal standard. But God will not have it. He is love (I John 4:8), so He gets to decide what it looks like and how it operates, forever and always.

The eternal, unblemished and unquestionable goodness of God is not simply an abstract theological construct by which bookworm Christians interpret Scripture and derive confessions for denominational conformity. It is the very basis of all reality. The goodness of God is not something to be agreed upon so much as it is to be submitted to and accepted as a basic dynamic of life. It’s like gravity. It is an unalterable fundamental force of existence. And nothing proves that reality more than the cross.

If Sienna had not survived and the conclusion I had reached because of it was that God was not as good as He claims to be, I would be asserting that Sienna’s life and my experience as her parent are of more value than the sacrificial death of the Christ for the vindication of the glory of the eternal God. It would be looking at a universe full of evidence and ruling against it because I didn’t get what I wanted. My life is certainly not worth as much as Christ’s; my own selfish desire is the only thing that would make me believe my daughter’s was.

That doesn’t mean that a proper perspective keeps things from hurting. Biblical thinking is not an opiate. It is an anchor. It will secure you when the storm comes, but it doesn’t keep the storm from coming (Matthew 7:24-27).

God was gracious in His sparing and healing of my daughter. But loss will come. Pain will find me. It finds all of us. I can only hope and pray that when it does, the Holy Spirit will be gracious to subdue my selfish heart and remind me of what I know to be true, despite what I may feel:

“Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever.” - I Chronicles 16:34

“Good and upright is the Lord.” - Psalm 25:8

“The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; and He knows those who trust in Him.” - Nahum 1:7

The Lord is good to spare us from pain and He is good to lead us through it. He is good to save us from it and He is good to refine us with it. The knife in the hand of the surgeon cuts just like it does in the hand of an assassin. What we all must decide is not if God will cut us, but whether He is doing so to bring us harm or to give us more of what we truly need.

God is good. The cross proves it beyond the shadow of a doubt. The pain and trauma we will experience in this life are no less real or hurtful. We will not understand it all. But we must decide whether or not the goodness of God is an absolute of our existence or a judgment to be made based on our own personal experiences. The Bible was written by men who experienced more hardship and loss than I ever have (and probably ever will). Their conclusion was that the goodness of God was a non-negotiable dynamic of reality. When pain comes, we can wrestle with the idea that God might not be good after all, or we can wrestle with our own hearts and minds equipped with the absolute faith and confidence that He is.

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Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. - Romans 5:3-5

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. - James 1:2-4

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor be weary when reproved by Him.
For the Lord disciplines the one He loves,
and chastises every son whom He receives.”

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. - Hebrews 12:5-11